Amber
by SeasonVelvet
Summary: Helga and Arnold find themselves at a typical teenage party -- exciting, terrifying, wondrous, boring, embarrassing, lonely, and sexual.


I have not completed my other Hey Arnold story, Love is for Saps, which I imagine now as gaping like an untreated wound, but I have this one which has a simple premise: Helga and Arnold + classmates at party. It is therefore easier to write, and perhaps more rich in feeling and description because it is such a small idea with a small goal. Like inspecting a grain of sand versus squinting across a desert. Anyway, here it is, or here is it so far.

**Amber**

The amber liquid swirled in her cup as she stared into it, watching little bubbles form and pop. The sides of the cup were deformed, riddled with the rectangular indents of her two front teeth. The atmosphere was full and rich, static with the vibes of modern rock and roll and the voices of her classmates, which seeped like radiation into her cells, filling her with an odd, humming pleasure. She wanted to close her eyes and feel the party, idolize it with her mind, let it be over so she could relive it as a perfect memory in the safety of her room. But she had to keep her composure. Even the smell! She inhaled, letting her eyes flutter, a smile gracing her lips. Ever the poet, turning the shadowed reflections of the world into woven beauty. Experiencing the essence of life while being irrevocably outside of it.

***

A pair of eyes widened in surprise as they caught this show, as if they had been unconsciously seeking her, unconsciously seeking _it_. His pupils dilated, drawn to the fluttering eye lids, the widened nostrils, the undoubtedly erotic lazy smile. Unbeknownst to him, his own lips parted and his own nostrils flared in response to the sight.

Abruptly Helga's eyes flicked open and darted quickly around to each individual cluster of teenagers, making sure no one had seen her uncharacteristic display, the slipping of her Jungian mask. Arnold looked down and away, hoping she did not somehow sense his stare. A second past, and with his head still turned to the side, he peeked back up at her. She was again staring into her cup, pressed against the wall with its 1960's wooden panels and hung records, growing like a wall flower stemming up from the green, mothball-y carpet. _Wall __**flower**__, football head? What are you trying to __**do**__ to me? It's wall __**moss**__ to __**you**__, buddy boy. _As if a Helga lived inside his head, he heard more than imagined her reaction to his uncouth thoughts -- that would be, if she didn't publically humiliate him for making 'moon eyes' at her, beat him to a pulp with Old Betsy and the Five Avengers, and then forever taunt him with his 'namby-pamby _feelings_' until the day he died -- first.

But he did not retreat. Images from novels he'd read, movies he'd seen, came to his mind, piecing themselves together to form the complete collage, a picture of perfect stereotype:

_Loner girl, misunderstood, at party surrounded by 1960's décor because retro is cool, looking into cup and dreaming big, sad eyes and a pink dress, Time After Time by Cindy Lauper playing in background as she is watched by unknown admirer._

Stereotypes have a way of going straight to your mind, exploding there, and then seeping down into your heart. He wanted to give himself over, and just watch her, but shook himself free of this lull and mimicked her actions by looking into his own cup. _What is __**in**__ this iced tea?_ He wondered, feeling just a little _too_ good. He took in his surroundings, watching mouths open and smile, hands move to accentuate, feet shuffle in a wanting dance, shoulders lean and sway.

He felt detached from the scene, as if he were watching a movie with a distorted picture and out of sync audio, and yet felt a complete part of it at the same time, because he was one of them, experiencing the same things they were. His anonymity at the moment lent him a sense of collaborability, conformity, as if he were just another blue pine needle, scattering into the waves and clear cascades. The full haiku came to him and he recited it in his mind, surprised at finding it had stayed with him:

Clear cascades,

Into the waves scatter,

Blue pine needles.

He had chanced upon it, written in elegant purple-penned cursive in the margin of a lain open page of Helga's school notebook, which had been left thrown over her math textbook in the wake of her rising to use the washroom. A note stemming from it read, _People = pine needles. Fate/life = clear cascades_. He had looked at her curiously then, hands on her hips at the front of the class as she informed the teacher, none too tactfully, of her plans. Another instruction, another clue, it had been, to the Lament Configuration that was Helga G. Pataki. She was one mystery, puzzle, problem, he had yet to solve.

He wasn't sure he wanted to. He wasn't sure he could. He wasn't sure what would happen if he did.

***

_What is __**in**__ this iced tea?_ She wondered, feeling strangely vulnerable, susceptible, as if her walls had thinned, bone turned to cartilage. She had upon her an unexplainable nervousness, a sense of anxiety for . . . possibilities. Too much want and too little self control. Her nerves buzzed with electricity, either going to become stock still in frigidity or melt into malleable, permeable jelly.

She looked up to scan the basement, her eyes searching and locking on to her target – Arnold. It would seem as if she had been programmed to find only him, and always him – but as if the code had never been finished, there was no course of action after that. Would she shoot and fire, or implode on herself?

Arnold sat cross-legged on the tail end of a group of people, picking wound balls of green carpet fluff and rolling them between his forefinger and thumb. His upper body leant in towards the group, though his head was tilted to the opposite, absent mindedly perceiving the composition of the ball being caressed between his fingers, its various hairs and debris. He seemed thoughtful, though without a tension in his brow or frown to his lips, the marks of brooding. With a flick of his forefinger, the ball was banished from his thumb, and he straightened, having become aware of his radical leaning and pained neck. He tilted his head back to the ceiling and rolled his shoulders, releasing his discomfort, eyes closed, before turning to Gerald who glanced and grinned at him. Arnold grinned back.

Helga felt her heart swell, her body fill with a tragic want. The small friction between his finger and thumb had ignited a desire already a glow, to burn dangerously as a brittle forest in a dry season; all that she was made of, consisted of, was now as kindling to the fire. His lean fingers holding softly, firmly, the tendons of his hand rising and falling as piano keys, the stretch of his dress shirt across his shoulders, how the shirt sleeves weren't rolled up to the elbows but buttoned at the wrists, and his smooth fair eye lids as they rested languidly on his listening eyes. His skin as Helga imagined it would be, warm and cool and suave under her finger tips, to her lips as they pressed, sweet and salty to her tongue as it licked and devoured, to her teeth as they grazed and nipped and pulled.

She did not think these things, they were old thoughts. Only felt them, as buried corpses resurfacing after a heavy rain, to lie vulgarly now in sight of all the peaceful forest. Though she, the murderer, was never spared this sight, as the memory of the corpses, of the time when they were things which were alive, of their murder, of their burial, haunted her in the dark – the dark that was solitude, loneliness, the darkness of quite moments, of sleep, of dreaming. And Helga was always in darkness. Arnold had been the light – and she had snuffed it twixt her fingers, blown it out and down like the Big Bad Wolf, put out the light like a rash, jealous, angry Othello, as the moon as it eclipses the sun. Her lust for him ignited her, yet fire to a forest means naught but eventual death if it never ceases, if no rain falls, when the sun cannot shine to grow and heal.

This current ran so far underground that to her conscious mind, all she registered was desire and sadness, her underwear that was moving towards an uncomfortable destination, and how much she liked the current song.


End file.
